just a passing dream
by postscriptress
Summary: He doesn't know when it started, but what he does know is that since this would all end anyway, he wishes it'll do him a favor and end very soon. Because this is just cruel. (Or, the introspective angst fic nobody asked for.)


He doesn't know when it started, but what he does know is that since this would all end anyway, he wishes it'll do him a favor and end very soon.

Because this is just cruel.

It's absolutely cruel. Masayuki Hori had spent eighteen full years not being blinded, maimed, or otherwise harmed by the 'wonderful' thing his peers called love, mostly unscathed save that one time in his childhood with the handmade chocolate. He'd been fine, good grades, friendships okay, plays all right, and then all of a sudden this comes at his doorstep.

Well, less at his doorstep, more at Nozaki's.

If the epiphany were to play out like one of his plays, it would've been more like this: he opens the door to Nozaki's and there she was, in all her petite-framed, big-ribboned glory, the spring in his step and the one singular chink in Masayuki's impeccable hypothetical armor, sunlight framing her face and her smile as warm as a thousand suns. And then Masayuki's heart would stop and cry foul because this is Nozaki's beta assistant. The one who'd been holding a candle for Nozaki since the beginning of time. Chiyo Sakura.

But this is how things actually went: when Sakura had gotten out of the bathroom sans ribbons, and had told Masayuki he was cute with his hair down with a (rather shocked?) earnest expression, he had snapped back, not because he thought he was mocking her, but because he'd not wanted her to think of him as anything less than a man.

Either way, though, whether playful imagination or dull reality, one thing stays the same: the world really likes screwing him over.

Because of all the billions of people in the world, the millions of people in Japan, the hundreds of people in their school, of all the classmates and clubmates and everyone else in between, it just has to be her who Masayuki can't stop thinking about. Her who keeps him up at night every time she makes her way to his dreams. The one girl who he is absolutely sure, without a doubt, who would never like him back.

That is, if this whatever it is he's been feeling for her still could be classified as being in the 'like' category. He wishes it still were.

"Hori-senpai?"

"Ah. Yes, Sakura?"

"You'd inked over that line three times already." Crap, she noticed. She normally doesn't notice, what with all the inking and Nozaki-gazing she gets up to, so why the hell does she have to notice him now? Conclusion: life hates Masayuki Hori. "You'd almost gone through the manuscript. Something wrong?"

"No, not really." And it was true. Save for the sinking feeling tugging down his chest whenever he saw Sakura do googly eyes at Nozaki, but that was his problem and nothing she really should know about. "I was just thinking about something."

"Kashima-kun get you in trouble again?" Sakura says, sighing, dipping her pen in ink. "Just tell me, senpai, I'll try to help."

"No, Kashima's...strangely normal right now, as a matter of fact." Sure she still flirted around like the world was ending and was still excessively social, but. These past few days, she'd not done things that would've made Masayuki throttle her into next Friday. Instead she'd barely made it into their club meetings, quietly did her work, recited her lines perfectly, and basically was the perfect club member Masayuki no longer had to nag her to be.

When he'd asked her about this sudden one-eighty, Kashima had smiled a thin, sad smile and said, softly, that she'd "given up". Which was weird beyond compare, especially since she still took up all her plays and aced all her exams and didn't tell him what she was giving up on, had only bored into his soul with those golden-green eyes that, he thought, had been trying to tell him something.

"Huh. Why that look on your face, then? You look sad."

Really now.

"Sakura-senpai's right, Hori-senpai!" Wakamatsu pipes up from beside him, brow furrowed in worry. "Did Nozaki-senpai go crazy with the background instructions again?"

"Yeah, it's just background stuff, really, don't mind it." He says, lies, rather, waving off their worried faces with a flick of his wrist.

The only way this could ever be connected to backgrounds is that, for once, he wishes that Sakura would look and see him. Masayuki himself. As someone other than the reliable senpai, the background character in Nozaki's ragtag group of assistants.

But he knows that life doesn't work that way, that just wishing about things don't make them come true, so he looks back down at the manuscript, sighs, and continues on inking.

The only fairytale character he'd ever known of who didn't have their love reciprocated was the original Little Mermaid. He knows how she slipped away when her prince married his princess, eschewed having to hurt him by being the foam atop the waves of the sea.

At the very least, Masayuki knows that he does not want to have that ending.

His love story never ends with a kiss, or even a denied confession. It ends with him shucking off his blue tie after graduation and winding it through her (for once) ribbonless hair, saying that he'll miss her.

He'd had to settle for the tie, because the second button off his blue uniform shirt would've been too obvious. And just because he's going to uni in Tokyo doesn't mean he's gonna go the full ten yards and risk everything he has with her, risk all their easy friendship just because of the jealousy weighing down his bones whenever she'd so much as smile at Nozaki, because of a couple of erratic heartbeats.

So it's the tie he gives instead - almost as old as the entire year he knew her, always tucked away into a pocket every time they worked together, draped over his second button, over his heart. It's an acceptable substitute, he thinks.

But that means she doesn't get it, which is kind of the whole point, anyway.

He never tells her. Years pass by and seasons change and life goes on, but he never tells her.

Thinking about saying it, imagining how her cheeks would flush pink with the intensity of his words, is one thing. Actually putting it to tangible spoken sounded-out words is another. To tell her would be to take all the rose-tinted sugar-spun memories of high school and room 606 and her pretty face and leave them lying out to dry in the sun, forgotten and discarded. And he doesn't want that. Not when Sakura still sends him mail sometimes, Mikoshiba and Nozaki falling asleep over the manuscript (and each other), Kashima in one of her plays (come to think of it, he hasn't heard from her in a while), Wakamatsu marvelling over the fact that Seo wears socks for singing contests. Sometimes she sends him selfies with kittens ("Look, senpai, it's just like the cat you used to draw on your beta portions!"), and they are few and so far between that he can count on his hand the times he has to physically restrain himself from setting those pictures as his wallpaper. It's a luxury of having her trust, of being her friend, one he does not want to lose.

Masayuki does not want to lose her, or her friendship, and he sure as hell doesn't want to be seafoam. So since he didn't make any deals with any hypothetical sea witches anyway, this is what he does. Masayuki keeps on going the way he normally is - responsible and serious and without time for romance other than one scripted for in plays or spelled out in a manga manuscript - because he knows that, like all things, love is just a moment in the wellspring of his entire life.

One day he'll wake up and Sakura won't be in his dreams anymore. But for now, he's here and she's there and sometimes they and all their friends get to laugh and be happy together, and he thinks that it'll be alright, in the end.

Because having her in his life as she is now will always be better than any impossible dream he might've used to have.

No matter how good a dream may seem to be, it'll always just be a dream.

And he wants a life where he could be happy with her without always having to check if he's woken up yet. So he smiles, replies back to her first mail ("I saw a girl in ribbons today. Reminded me of you.") and goes forth to live it.

.

.

**Original AO3 Link: **** /works/2643668**


End file.
